orse: the mud was deeper, the road narrower.
Jo tried to escape the mud and made for the roadside, but the ground
moved under her and some muttered curses arose. She was walking not on
grass but on crowds of sleeping boys, and very nearly trod on a face. We
settled down again on our mackintosh sheet but did not sleep. Some
soldiers were firing off guns and throwing bombs into the river all
night. Near us lay Owen, who coughed for a couple of hours, after which
he gave up the spot as being too wet, and lay in a cart on Whatmough's
face.

It rained, Jo had the fidgets, and Jan expostulated. The mackintosh was
too small for us and we got gloriously wet. It is a curious feeling--the
rain pattering on one's face when trying to sleep. By the time one
becomes accustomed to the monotony of the tiny drops--_splash_ a big
drop from a tree. Water collects in folds of hat or rug, and suddenly
cascades down one's neck.

At four in the morning the corporal crept up submissively to ask if we
might move on, as the horses were cold and hungry. Only too glad, dark
as it was, we rolled up our damp bundles and put them in the waggons
with the sleeping people, who awoke, pink-eyed and puzzled at the sudden
progress forward of their uncomfortable beds. Whatmough, who was
convinced that the bombs and gunshots of the night before were spent
Austrian shells sailing over the hill, said--

"That's the first time I've ever liked a fellow sleeping on my face."

One of the Stobart nurses, who had used the remains of the hay as a
pillow, had been awake all night trying to prevent a hungry horse from
eating her hair along with the hay. With determination she had donned a
Balaklava helmet and trudged along all day in it, even later when the
sun came out. Blease, too, started the chillsome dawn in a Balaklava
wearing shawlwise a rug that had been made of bits of various coloured
woollen scarfs. Jan used as a protection from the rain Jo's white
mackintosh apron filleted round his head with a bit of string and
dangling behind with a profusion of tapes and fasteners.

Under his khaki great-coat and about a foot longer he wore a white
jaconet hospital coat. Jo had a pair of roomy ski boots into which she
had fitted two pairs of stockings; one had been knitted for her by a
Serbian girl, and they were so thick and hard that no suspender would
hold them up, so they stood, concertinawise, over the boots. One of our
drivers, a witch-faced old man, had a dar